This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Jazzing Up Ancient Texts
In 2000, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb had just moved to Boston from Israel to attend the New England Conservatory when she received a care package from her mother. In it was a copy of ShirHaShirim, one of the five scrolls that constitute the third book of the Tanach. Many believe that King Solomon, born in Jerusalem…
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Reassessing FDR’s Legacy
In his counterfactual vision of the United States during World War II, “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagines a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator turned America Firster and Nazi sympathizer. President Lindbergh soon signs a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and pogroms and…
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New Book Incites Scholarly Fracas
As a book that that seeks to upend commonly held historical notions, Robert N. Rosen’s “Saving the Jews” is by its very nature a combative work. But even by Rosen’s standards, his 17th chapter is a confrontational one. It is here that he engages FDR’s detractors most directly, in language that prompted 55 scholars to…
The Latest
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The Wicked Witch and the Straw Man
The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred and the Jews By David Mamet Schocken, 208 pages, $19.95. The world of Jewish identity is a buyer’s market. Those of us who “do Jewish” for a living or as an avocation (rabbis, writers, editors, artists, organizational pros, philanthropists) know that half our audience is only half-interested, while the rest…
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Found in Translation: A Round-up
Language, our first barrier, now also seems our last. Babel is one bookend of human communication; today’s instantaneous transmission of Babel through a baffling array of technologies is the other. Perhaps one of the oldest occupations, after the making of towers, is translation — that utopian and often invisible task of making one word mean…
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September 15, 2006
100 Years Ago in the forward East Broadway seltzer vendor Henry Mittleman was blown to bits last week after a seltzer tank exploded in the basement of his store. Mittleman, who was working just a few feet from the tank, was thrown more than 20 feet by the blast. After he arrived at the hospital,…
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Redrawing Family History
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors By Bernice Eisenstein Riverhead Books, 192 pages, $23.95. Early in her new memoir, author-illustrator Bernice Eisenstein recalls the experience of having seen the 1982 Holocaust drama “Sophie’s Choice,” which arrived in theaters when she was in her early 30s. Eisenstein describes her deep, visceral response to the picture…
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Notes From the Edge
On Broadway, late summer is known as the off-season. But in the downtown theater world, life begins in August. Every year at this time, the kaleidoscopic burst of creativity known as the New York International Fringe Festival lights up Lower Manhattan. Now in its 10th year, North America’s largest multi-arts festival hosts hundreds of performances…
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As Modernity Beckoned
Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture By Matthias B. Lehmann Indiana University Press, 280 pages, $39.95. Until the end of the 15th century, the Iberian Peninsula was not only a Muslim enclave but also a site of dialogue between three religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The expulsion of Jews and Arabs irrigated their communities…
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Upstart Wineries Drench Previously Arid Country
As the war battered the prime vineyards of Israel’s cool, hilly north in Lebanon last month, Micha Vaadia, the Galil Mountain winemaker, found himself defying the army’s curfew and donning a helmet and flak jacket to inspect the growing ripeness of his grapes. His fruit survived intact, but a Lower Galilee winery, Dalton, ended up…
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Remembering Israel’s James Joyce
With the August 21 passing of Yizhar Smilansky, Israeli literature lost a voice of moral conscience and modern Hebrew lost one of its most gifted virtuosos. (He wrote under the name S. Yizhar, as he was and is universally known in common parlance as Samekh Yizhar.) Dubbed the James Joyce of Hebrew literature, Smilansky —…
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